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Dear Colleagues, to make this discussion a bit more diverse and interesting, I'd like to contribute my 2 cents and recent experience here: I'm currently re-designing a course, and was trying to determine what exactly students from the per-requisite courses were actually (supposed to be) able to do when the coming into my course. So I looked at the course syllabi of those prior courses - alas, there was no clear indication what students were really supposed to learn (as they had no clear learning outcomes listed). First of all, I think this is not fair to the students if we do not share what we have in mind (we do have something in mind I suppose ;-). Also, this lack of clear LO resulted in me having to ask a number of instructors to get a better picture of what they really do in their course. While I don't mind asking them, it's simply inefficient and I honestly do not see any good argument why we should not communicate what we, the instructors, hope students will learn and get out of our courses. While I can imagine certain political reasons and process-related issues that might argue against the current implementation plans, I find that in general, clear learning outcomes can be an invaluable tool in designing good courses: They help us to design aligned teaching/learning activities, they communicate to the students some of the things they might learn in this course, and help us all to reduce unnecessary redundancies and thus layer courses better, so we can teach at an appropriate level. The main potential issue I see with providing explicit desired learning outcomes would be if they were written in stone and couldn't be adjusted as necessary/appropriate without much administrative effort. If this is part of the current plan (no sure on this - I honestly didn't manage to dig through all the documents), than I would suggest that the ongoing discussion might want to address this issue directly, instead of in general arguing against LOs (which imho can be quite useful and improve both teaching and learning). I do believe that there is potential (and sometimes a need) to improve our teaching. My 2 cents Bernhard On 2012-12-03 20:46, Christopher Pavsek
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Dear Colleagues: Apologies for any cross posting. -- --------------------------------------------------- Dr. Bernhard E. Riecke, Assistant Professor School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT) Simon Fraser University Surrey 250 - 13450 102 Avenue, Surrey, BC V3T 0A3, Canada web: iSpaceLab.com/Riecke www.siat.sfu.ca/faculty/Bernhard-Riecke office: 2830 (2nd floor) E-mail: ber1@sfu.ca phone:+1 778.782.8432 fax: 778.782.9422 |